Get Rich Education 515: Unpacking the Myths: How Rent Control Affects Housing Quality and Availability
Independent documentary filmmaker and policy analyst at Reason Foundation, Jen Sidorova, joins us to discuss how rent control impacts tenants, landlords and the housing market. Her latest short film project, “Shabbification: The Story of Rent Control”, reflects how rent control has a direct effect on housing quality.
Almost half of rentals in NYC are rent-stabilized.
We highlight the challenges faced by small property owners and the potential consequences of these regulations on the housing market. Bathtub in your kitchen, anyone? Yes, you read that correctly. In some cases maintenance has been deferred for so long that units have not been updated to code.
Learn about the history of rent control and stabilization laws in New York.
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Show Notes:
You can follow Jen on Instagram @jen_sidorova or check out her writing at reason.org
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Keith Weinhold 0:01
Welcome to GRE. I discuss the effect that now lower mortgage rates can have how to get a strong return with private lending. Then, for this week's guest, she is a public policy expert with reason.com maker of a new film called Shabbification that spotlights the perils and even horrors of rent control in New York City, and she's a young Russian immigrant that lives in one unit of a Buffalo fourPlex and rents out the other three today on Get Rich Education.
When you want the best real estate and finance info, the modern Internet experience limits your free articles access, and it's replete with paywalls and you've got pop ups and push notifications and cookies disclaimers. Oh, at no other time in history has it been more vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that actually adds no hype value to your life. See, this is the golden age of quality newsletters, and I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor, and it's to the point to get the letter. It couldn't be more simple text, GRE to 66866, and when you start the free newsletter, you'll also get my one hour fast real estate course, completely free. It's called the Don't quit your Daydream letter, and it wires your mind for wealth. Make sure you read it. Text GRE to 66866, text GRE to 66866.
Corey Coates 1:40
you're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.
Keith Weinhold 1:56
Welcome to GRE from Ankara,Turkey to Anchorage, Alaska and across 488 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to Get Rich Education. Today's guest was one of four panelists at a conference that I attended recently. The panel was named innovative solutions to the housing crisis, and her story struck me as interesting, so I invited her to be on the show today, we'll learn that with rent control in New York City, when landlords cannot go inside their own properties and aren't allowed to sell their own properties, seven states have price ceilings on rents, and I'll tell you here At GRE we avoid investing in these places. Listen closely, California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Maine, Oregon, Minnesota and then DC too. Now sometimes rent control isn't too restrictive. For example, you can raise the rent no more than the rate of inflation plus 3% per year, or the rate of inflation plus 5% per year. And also, it's not all parts of those states where it applies. In fact, you typically do not find the policies statewide in those states that I mentioned, although you do in Oregon, it's statewide in Oregon, and there you can still raise the rent 7% plus the rate of inflation each year. And the good news is that 37 states actually have laws against rent control, specifically saying that you cannot enact it. So not only do 37 states not have it, they just wouldn't even allow a law for it. And there is a strong consensus, like I mentioned here on the show before, among economists that rent control, it reduces the quantity and quality of housing. Today, we'll focus on just how dilapidated rental units become under rent stabilization, which is a lot like rent control in New York City. And we'll discuss New York State and Buffalo. And by the way, I find something amazing. I mean, just say you would ask a question of any citizen of the world, no matter where they live, from Indonesia to Japan, to Bangladesh, to Nigeria to the United States. If you would just ask any citizen of the world, what is the capital of the world? I think that the best answer that you could come up with is New York City. I'm in the United States, and there are people right here in this country that have such little understanding of New York City, and what goes on there, and where it even is, it just amazes me. Maybe it's my own bias, because I'm a geography guy, but now, for example, to get from New York City out to Buffalo, that's an almost seven hour drive to the northwest two different parts of New York State. These are two very different places. We'll get into that shortly. But first in the wider real estate world, I did a little research since first mentioning this to you last week here, where mortgage rates have fallen fully one and a half points from the recent high. All right. Well, with every half point drop in mortgage rates, like I learned from First American, that's my source. With every half point drop in mortgage rates, about 1.1 million additional American households can qualify to buy an entry level home that's defined as the bottom 25% priced here. That's the number, and I checked their math. So with a full point drop in mortgage rates, then 2.2 million more American households can qualify to buy an entry level home. So we could very well have more buyers here soon, but yeah, when all these homeowners are still locked into three and 4% mortgage rates, I don't know that you're gonna have that many more sellers. So with demand exceeding supply, look for more upward pressure on home prices, especially higher values for those entry level homes that make the best rentals. Now, I'm talking about borrowing right there. And what happens when rates go down for mortgages, when they go down for borrowing? Well, rates on savings accounts, they typically fall as well. And this is a scenario that a lot of people expect. Now, most of my real estate activity is a borrower. I'm always here touting the virtues of how leverage builds wealth, and I know that I don't want to be a saver. So for my more liquid funds, I am a lender, and I'm reliably paid a stable 8% interest rate. And I think I've told you before that for years now, I make loans to real estate companies, and they use my funds to rehab properties and for other operations. Yes, an 8% return that I'm getting, and it's almost like getting an 8% yield on a savings account, and it's not expected to fall when interest rates fall. Well, the primary difference is that I often have to wait a few months if I want my full principal return, but not years. So it's not as rigid as a bank CD, but it's not as liquid as an old fashioned bank savings account. So the private real estate company that I've long made loans to works pretty diligently to maintain asset value and assure optimal returns. They'll tell you that they've never missed making a payment for their private money lending programs. And I did a little research, and I found that their fund utilization is 99.6% that really means that they deploy almost all of the capital if you want, you can potentially get a high yield at the same place I do. Sometimes you can get more than 8% or less than an 8% return, depending on what liquidity terms you want and what other terms you like. The company is Freedom Family Investments. They are real estate centric. If you want, go right ahead and learn more. You can do that by texting FAMILY to 66866. Remember, you're the lender, they're the borrower. And again, for most investment types, I want to be the borrower, but for liquid funds, and the fact that the rate of inflation is now down, an 8% return has a higher real yield now than it did two years ago and one year ago. And again, I'm happy to share it with you. It's Freedom Family Investments. If you want to learn more, do it now while it's on your mind and text FAMILY to 66866.
This week, our guest is a public policy expert that's also involved with a film called Shabbification, the story of rent control. Hey, welcome to GRE Jen Sidorova.
Jen Sidorova 9:16
Good to be here. Thank you for having me.
Keith Weinhold 9:18
Yeah and congrats. Shabbification screening in a lot of places, like the Anthem Film Festival at Freedom Fest last month and this month in New York City, tell us about the film.
Jen Sidorova 9:31
Yeah, so in Shabbification, I follow small property owners like myself who are subject to regulation, and most of them are owners of rent stabilized properties in the city of New York. Right, I follow three specific landlords. I They take me to their homes, they take me to their properties, and they show me around, and you can visually see what regulation has done to their property. Yeah, one of these properties was occupied by a tenant. From 1969 up until 2021 wow. And the landlord was never allowed to be in the property, so obviously no repairs were made. And you could see visually that the apartment was like from the 60s. It's like a museum, but not in a good way, because it's really falling apart, right? So it's like, almost like a Tenement Museum, or, you know, another museum New York City, where we they actually preserve those dates. But in this case, a private landlord actually owns that space, and they're having a difficult time. And so what my specific Shabbification With my film is about is a very specific regulation in New York City that happened in 2019 that applied to rent stabilized properties. What it did that is that it won't allow landlords to put them properties on the market even if they rent stabilized tenant vacates them. They're no longer allowed to put their properties on the market at all. And more than that, they are also not allowed to raise rent, even if they do repairs. So sometimes the cost of repairs in New York City for one bedroom unit can be 200,000 and they're only allowed to raise the rent by like roughly $90 a month, and only for 15 years. So it will take them, like, 200 years to recoup their investment. And obviously that doesn't make any sense, so stories like that is what my short film is about. I myself am a small property owner, so it was very special for me to go and kind of tell the story of people like me.
Keith Weinhold 11:36
That's amazing. So rent stabilization something that New York City has a history of. I sort of think of that as a genteel term or rent control. And a lot of times when your rent can't be raised above a certain amount, you get these long term tenants, in some cases, for decades, and in this case, over 50 years, with this particular tenant in New York City and landlords don't have much of any incentive to improve property when rent control is in place, because they know they cannot get a commensurate bump in rent.
Speaker 1 12:11
rent control and rent stabilization are a form of government enforced limit on the rents. And in New York we have two laws that govern that we have more but the most prominent ones are the rent control law of 1969 and the Rent Stabilization Act of 1974 so back in the day, there were issues with availability of affordable housing, and the government was trying to fix it, and that fix was supposed to be temporary. It was supposed to eventually run out once the tenants who were currently in place at the time in late 60s and 70s, once they move out, landlords were able to put those properties back on the market. And eventually, that's kind of what was going on up until 2019 when housing stability and Tenant Protection Act made it so that the landlords could no longer put their rent stabilized properties on the market anymore. So essentially, all rent stabilization became permanent in the state of New York, and actually, in the just a couple of weeks after my film, in April of 2024 we had another law. It's called Good Cause Eviction, and that one regulates every landlord or enterprise who owns more than 11 units. So once you own 11 units or more, you're subject to regulation. You can no longer evict your tenant without a good cause. And there's a bunch of other rules that apply, including the limit on how much rent you can raise year to year. So yeah, that's certainly what's going on. That's roughly the landscape all regulation in New York.
Keith Weinhold 13:44
Yeah, some of this is really punitive, because if rent control comes into a market, that's one thing sometimes that landlords want to do. They want to sell their property, and in some cases, there's a roadblock against that. You know, Jen, I looked up the definition of Shabbification. I just simply googled the term. Urban Dictionary had one of the first hits, and fortunately, it was a G rated definition there in urban dictionary, it was defined as the opposite of gentrification. So therefore with Shabbification, it's where a neighborhood goes through deterioration and despair. So tell us about some more of those bad cases of deterioration, in despair, in Shabbification. Just how bad does it get?
Speaker 1 14:30
Well, one of the properties that we went to was basically from 1910 it was in Chinatown, and we saw was that the bathtub was in the kitchen in that property, oh my gosh. And I believe that was a way for them to do renovations fast and cheap, like 100 years ago. And because that property falls under rent stabilization, and there's obviously limits on how much rent you can charge. So. Landlords of those properties never really make renovations. Sometimes you could see cases like the director of photography, who was in the film, he lives in a rent sabilized property, and in his case, he has a shower unit in his kitchen as well. Instead of a tub, he has a shower unit. And it kind of is, as he described as one of those telephone booths, like, you know, red telephone booths from London, and then kind of just sits in the kitchen, and you obviously cannot really have company or friends visiting or dinner or anything if you have something like that. But those are the setups that we frequently see. Also a lot of things like uneven floors or just, you know, the property, if it's not being taken care of, there might be, like, a hole in the wall, a hole in the ceiling, or the ceiling is falling out. And those are really graphic images. And we do, we do capture them on camera a lot in Shabbification, and that comes from, kind of, my attraction to urban decay. I do enjoy, you know, touring older buildings, or maybe buildings that are preserved as a ruin, maybe like an old prison and or like an old mental asylum. I do do that a lot. It's just a hobby when I travel. So I was always attracted to that esthetic, and that does show in my film as well. I think I love studying the tragedy because I love studying how the hope died, because it's fascinating to me. It's very specific to usually a town or a city, and then just is so telling, and it's such a teaching moment for us as a society to kind of revisit those stories and figure out why did that hope die. And you can see a lot of that in the film.
Keith Weinhold 16:41
it's a great way to scratch one's itch for I suppose, seeing real life haunted houses, if you will, in Jen's film Shabbification here. Well, Jen, we've been talking about the conditions of the tenants. Why don't we talk more about how the landlord is portrayed in Shabbification.
Speaker 1 17:00
since this is the story, primary of the landlords, not so much on the tenant. You know, normally in this sort of films and these sort of documentaries, the story falls in tenant, because the tenant is the one who is seen as likable and sympathetic person, and that's how, and that's usually a more preferable framing angle. But in my story, my story is a story of a merchant class, or like a more, like a war on the merchant class, the war on landlords. Because in the state of New York, no matter how small or large of a landlord you are, whether you own one unit or 1000 by a lot of people in New York State Legislature as a landlord, you're seen as evil. They think you've done something wrong and you have to be punished. So that's the attitude to a lot of landlords, and although they're not that many small property owners, and sometimes we're not seen as a sympathetic I think this is the story that we need to tell, because some of them are like me. I am an immigrant to this country. Once I got an opportunity, I got my first rental property in Buffalo, New York, and right away, I've been renting out three units and lived in one, and I still do own it. Five years later, I live alongside with my tenants. When I go on vacations, they feed my cat, and when they go travel for work, I do take care of their properties. I water their plants, do things like that. So we do live as a small community, and this is something that a lot of people do in Buffalo, because it's a working class city. It's very hard to be able to afford a single family home. Right away, what you can do is acquire one of these properties, either a two unit, three or four unit, because when you're four units less, then you can do an FHA loan, which I did, and you can put minimum amount down, which I did, and then day one, right away, the income from the tenants was paying off my mortgage, right? That's kind of how I can build generational wealth. But not only that, that's how I can start my journey of home ownership and hopefully building generational wealth in the future, as I've said. And I also have my own passion for buildings, and we did a lot of renovations with my family on that property. So there's a lot of heart and soul in that space. And laws like rent control and Good Cause Eviction, they put a cap on people like me and how much we can grow. Because, as I've mentioned, the Good Cause Eviction in New York, it puts a cap on how far and how big people like me can grow. Because once you have 11 units, that's my cap. Once I have 11 units, I have subject to regulation, and somebody like me cannot afford having a tenant who would just never move out. So yeah, I think these laws, they intended to protect the needy. They intended to protect the families, but they do just the opposite. They. Just limit how much we can grow, and they also just make an environment within our properties very toxic, because tenants now basically have more rights than we do.
Keith Weinhold 20:09
Yeah, well, you're really humanizing the plight of the landlord here, Jen with your four Plex over there. For those that aren't familiar with the geography in western New York in Buffalo, sort of the opposite end of the state where New York City is. And, yeah, I mean, landlords are usually portrayed in media is these people that are sort of greedy and bumbling and they won't fix the broken air conditioner. And, you know, it's, it's unusual to me, Jen, that a lot of people tend to resent landlords, whom are often small business owners, but yet they champion other small business owners. And talk about how, you know, small business ownership is the very heart of America. I'm trying to figure out why that is, you know, maybe some tenants that just don't really understand how things work. Just think, well, why should I have to pay this landlord. All I'm doing is sort of renting air or renting space. But you know, one group of tenants that does not seem to resent landlords, Jen, in my experience, that is people that were previously homeowners and are now tenants. They don't seem to resent landlords, and that's probably because that tenant that has experience being a homeowner. They've seen bills for property tax and property insurance and mortgage principal and mortgage interest and maintenance and repairs. I think that's what makes the difference.
Jen Sidorova 21:33
Yeah, definitely. It's almost like, you know, when I lived with my parents, I didn't pay attention to the bills, like election bills or water bills or anything. But once you start living on your own, you now see how it gets deducted from your account, and then it changes you, adds you towards consumption, changes right? You now turn off the light when you leave and do just small things like that. And that's a similar psychology that works with people who previously owned their own homes. I think what the dynamic that's happening here with tenants is there's always going to be more tenants than landlords, so tenants have a lot more political power, and we see a lot of that in New York. We have a lot of tenant groups, tenant unions, who are very hold a little, a lot of political power. And it's one side of it, another side of it is that a lot of these policies do benefit large landlords, in a sense that once the small property owner is no longer able to keep up the property and they just foreclose on it, a larger landlord can always pick it up. And for large landlords, these costs of litigating with the tenant, or the cost of fixing a unit, or even the cost of having somebody live without paying for a few months, these are just the costs of running business, whereas for somebody like me, it's a significant chunk of my income, right? So at the moment, I think it's like 25% of my income is coming from the rentals, so it's significant. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, on the other side of political power, I just legislators who do not want to see private rentals. You know, small property owners having rentals and Damn, motivations are something else. It's almost like, if there's one conspiracy theory that I believe in, is that one you know, is that there is a war on the merchant class among some legislators, especially in the state of New York, who really just do not want to see small property owners providing housing to the community, and they would rather see it in in the hands of larger developers, and that's just the nature of how political process works, sometimes.
Keith Weinhold 23:45
in the broad business world, large institutional corporations, they're often pro regulation for just the reason you talked about it helps put smaller operators out of business that can't bear the expense of dealing with the regulation. But yeah, your film Shabbification, it helps underscore the fact that rent control, it stifles the free market in the process of price discovery. I mean really that price discoveries, that is the process of supply versus demand, with the referee being the price and finding that right rent amount, and amidst this low housing supply we have, it's just really bad timing for any jurisdiction to enact rent control. Existing landlords stop improving property. Builders stop building new property, and it can make landlords want to sell, like we touched on earlier. But also I'd like to talk about making the other case, the case for rent control. When we come back, we're talking with public policy expert Jan siderova, the maker of a film called shabbatation, where we come back. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, hey, you can get your mortgage loans at the same place where I get mine at. Ridge lending group NMLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than any provider in the entire nation because they specialize in income properties, they help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. You can start your pre qualification and chat with President changley Ridge personally. Start now, while it's on your mind at Ridge lendinggroup.com that's Ridge lendinggroup.com.
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Keith Weinhold 26:52
Welcome back to Get Rich Education. We're talking with a really interesting guest, Jen Sidorova. She's the maker of a new film called Shabbification. This centers on rent control and dilapidated housing conditions. And Jen, you know, I've talked about here on both this episode and another episode a few weeks ago about the deleterious downstream consequences of rent control. It benefits a small group of people in the short term and ends up with deteriorated neighborhoods in a lot of municipalities, but I like to look at things from the other side. What is the case for rent control?
Jen Sidorova 27:27
So I think the the original story behind the rent control in New York City was that in the 70s, it was just really dire situation, kind of what we're going through right now. Right now in New York we have the housing crisis that's the worst in the last 50 years, so basically right around the 70s again. So the current vacancy rate is like 2% and at the same time, we have between 20 to 60,000 rent stabilized rent control units that are vacant because landlords just do not want to put them in more on the market, because talking just in New York City here, yeah, just New York City. And New York City has roughly 1 million of rent stabilized or rent control properties altogether. But yeah, so what is the case for rent control, right? So in my opinion, what is the most problematic saying about rent control or rent stabilization right now, the way the current laws are in New York City is that the property itself is being stabilized or controlled. It's not the person. It doesn't matter how much money you're making. If you're making half a million dollars, you can still live in an apartment that's like 500 $600 a month, right?
Keith Weinhold 28:38
You can have your second lavish vacation home out in the Hamptons, and it doesn't matter.
Jen Sidorova 28:42
Yeah, you can live in Texas for like, nine months out of a year, and come back to New York City for the summer, and then people do that. That's like, not, I'm not making it up. It's a real thing. People are basically hoarding these rent stabilized rent control units, and they just never let them go. And that definitely pushes out young people out of the city. It pushes immigrants out of the city, because people, yeah, all the newcomers. So that's what's going on. So instead of having a property itself being controlled, what could be done? Maybe like a voucher program, maybe like a housing voucher program, but we can only do this if we let the rent control and rent stabilization laws sunset. So once the current tenants move out, that has to be put back on the market, right? So what we could do is the housing voucher program maybe, so that we will always have people in the society that need a little bit of help, but it shouldn't be in such a way that they it's the landlord who is paying for it, right? So if there's a housing voucher, they can live wherever and however that program works in the sense that whoever picks up the rest of the bill, as long as it's not a landlord directly. Yeah, so that's how I see it. And I think just other things that can be done is better zoning regulation that allow more buildings to be built a lot of New York City. Is like a museum, right? We have a lot of historic buildings, a lot of preservation of all the buildings, but we have to reevaluate that, because we don't necessarily have to have the East Village look like a museum if we don't have enough housing, right? So we have to reassess of how much of those policies we still want to hold on to, and then maybe also building codes. Sometimes it's really hard to expand or have more units within the same building. If I have a four unit property and I want to convert it into five units, I am subject to whole different regulation and a whole different bunch of coding, whereas my square footage remains the same. So I think we have to revisit that, because a lot of these new materials that we work with when building are safe right now. So maybe we could let people do more with their properties, and that way we provide more house.
Keith Weinhold 30:50
Yeah. Well, some of this comes down to, how do you get politicians to say no to rent control, which I believe is part of the motivation of your film?
Jen Sidorova 31:01
Right, So the motivation behind myself was that I bought my property in 2019 I went under contract in 2019 and I fully acquired the rights in March of 2020 and between the August of 2019 and 2020 we had a new law passed that was housing stability and Tenant Protection Act 2019 in New York State, and that kind of put a cap on how much I can raise the rent if the tenant remains the same. And at the time when I found that out, I was like, well, that's kind of quirky, but whatever, what can I do? But then a year from that, like in 2021 we had a new mayoral candidate who was a socialist, openly socialist person, and they were advocating for rent control. And at the time, I had an opportunity to go to do a film workshop, and I was thinking, so what is that I really wanted to write film about? And I was this, definitely rent control, because it's relevant for me. It's the story of my people among small property owners, and that's how I did it. And I really want policy action. The idea behind this film, the goal is policy change, right? But this short film is only the beginning of my project, which is exploration of the topic prevent control in the state of New York and everywhere else in the country, and we keep interviewing more people, more experts, and to convert into a larger film, and then hopefully, like a full feature documentary, in order to educate both policymakers and the public about what rent control can do. And eventually, we do hope for policy change in New York, and hopefully, with this film, no more new rent control can happen, or at least when politicians start those bills, they take a look and talk to me and make some changes.
Keith Weinhold 32:52
Well, you're really doing some good work there. I appreciate that. I mean, rent control is analogous to price controls, and we see what happens when there's price controls per se foods like you've seen in other nations in previous decades, and that's how you end up with bread lines, because producers don't want to produce bread when they would have to take a loss and they can't profit on selling that bread. You see a shortage of housing come up just the same, like you do with bread. Well, tell us some more about Buffalo and its market. You had touched on it previously. I think they have lots of older two to four unit buildings there. It sounds like you found one of the four plexes where you could do the owner occupied thing. FHA, three and a half percent down 12 month owner occupancy period. Minimum credit score only needs to be 580 at last check, which is the same way I began with the four Plex building. But yeah, let's learn more about the buffalo housing market. Just a little bit there with rental properties and then the rising tide against Airbnb, like you touched on last month when we met in person.
Jen Sidorova 33:56
Right, so a lot of those properties, a lot of those older homes, were built around the late 1800s beginning or 1900 and that's how they used to build back in the day. Because what would happen is that a large Victorian home with two primarily stories, with two large floors and then maybe an attic and a basement, but one family would live on one floor and another on the second floor. So they were originally built for two homes, but at that time, both families would own that space, right? So there would be co owned by two families. Mine was also an originally a two family home that was converted into a four unit because the previous owners made an addition a lot of young families, that's how they start when they cannot afford a single family home. That's how they start with home ownership and the money that they make for with the rentals. That's how they pay mortgage partially, or maybe that's how they pay the taxes, depending on where you live in the city, sometimes tax burden can alone be very high. So as I've mentioned, we had some mayoral candidates talking about rent control, but recently we started having Airbnbs being regulated in Buffalo. And so there's a few districts in the city where Airbnb is regulated, and my district does not fall into that, and I actually am on four of my units. One is occupied by me. Two are long term tenants, and one which is the newest and the nicest one. I decided to make Airbnb interesting because I did not want to risk, you know, giving it to a long term tenant, because it's just such a nice unit. It's a lot of investment that went in there, so I didn't want it to be provided by somebody who would never leave, because the, you know, environment is just so toxic. You just don't want to take chances, unless you like, really believe in the time. But I don't know people are out here. So I decided to keep it Airbnb. And so because some of the other parts of the city are regulated, and mine is not. I am the beneficiary of that regulation because I get a lot, all of those clients, right, all those Airbnb client so in that sense, funny enough, I am benefiting from some parts of the city being regulated because my my part is not. So all the clients go to me. I do have an Airbnb right now, but we're definitely at the risk of all of the city being regulated. And I think a lot of people complain, right? People who lived in the city for a long time, allegedly, they started complaining to the city council about not recognizing their neighborhood because of Airbnb. But I think what legislators need to understand is that my generation, millennials and Gen Z. That's how we live our lives. We share our assets, right? It's like a big millennial and Gen Z thing that the Airbnb itself is a millennial thing, that this is just will be recognized, that assets like cars and houses, they can be shared, you don't have to have that many of them, even from the unit in the unit that I live in. When I I went out on a trip to Long Island last week, and I airbnbied my own unit. And so that's just how it is. That's just a little lifestyle. And when I see new people who stay in Airbnb on my street, it doesn't bother me. I kind of enjoy a little bit of a variety. But, you know, sometimes it's almost like a culture clash or a generational shift when it comes to thinking about properties and housing ownership. Yeah, that's just my experience.
Keith Weinhold 37:33
Younger generations embrace the sharing economy, and that is quite the mixed use building that you have there with your four Plex in Buffalo, you've got one unit that's a primary residence, a second unit that's a short term rental, and then two long term rental units. There's some diversification of income and utility, for sure. Well, Jen, tell us more about how our audience can connect with you, and especially how they can watch Shabbification.
Jen Sidorova 38:00
So Shabbification, right now is in the film festival circuit, so it's not available to watch yet. Although, if anyone reaches out directly to me through Instagram, my handle is @Jen_Sidorova, which is my first underscore, my last name, anyone can just reach out directly to me and I will send them a screener, and they can watch the full film. And also on my Instagram page, I do put a lot of like other content about buildings, and a lot of like videos so and some, you know, B roll footage that we haven't used in the film, but you can watch it in my Instagram. So yeah, definitely check it out. I also do write for Reason Foundation, and you can find it on my profile, my policy writing work. You can find it at reason.com and it's just under my name, pretty much Instagram and reason website.
Keith Weinhold 38:51
Jen, thanks so much for your Shabbification project. I really think it's going to help people see an important part of American society in a different light. It's been great having you here on the show.
Jen Sidorova 39:02
Thank you so much.
Keith Weinhold 39:09
I talked to Jen some more outside of our interview. Her buffalo four Plex has a high flying 1.04% rent to price ratio. I crunched it out that is super strong for a four unit building, but it is older, and like she said in the interview, she did make some substantial renovation to it, yeah, rent control is a bad plan. You know, on an episode a few weeks ago, I mentioned to you about last month's White House proposal for a sort of rent control light, that was such a bad plan. I told you that it only applies to property owners of 50 plus units, and rent increases were capped at 5% a year. Well, I dug into that release from the White House briefing room, and it's almost like they know it won't work, because. Oh my gosh, this is almost humorous. Economists and any long term thinkers will tell you that rent control doesn't work because you won't get any new builds. Well, the White House release Wood said it won't apply to new builds. It's almost like someone told them, like, hey, this won't work for that reason. So then they wrote that sentence in there, which just undermines so much of it. And economists will also tell you that what doesn't work because owners don't want to improve property well, yet, the White House release actually said it would not apply to substantially renovated property. I mean, my gosh, with these carve outs and all the other caveats that are in it that I described a few weeks ago, this White House rent control planet has no shot of going anywhere. It is lip service virtue signaling, and also would not get past a divided Congress. Really bad plan. In fact, how doomed to failure is wide scale rent control. Well, don't worry, the federal government hasn't regulated rent on private buildings since World War Two. Yeah, it's been 80 years, and it took World War Two scale conditions to bring it. Thanks again to today's guest, Jen Sidorova, with reason.com. Again, like I mentioned earlier, if you want to deploy some of your more liquid funds for a potential 8% return at the same place where I've been getting an 8% return for years, you can make a loan to a long standing real estate company for their property rehabs and other operations. This might really help you out. You can learn more by texting FAMILY to 66866, lots of great shows coming up here at GRE to actionably build your Real Estate Wealth until next week, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your daydream.
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Keith Weinhold 42:21
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